2 December 2012 Edition

Cover-up and lies at heart of the British Establishment

• Scandal: When the Kincora affair was first exposed allegations were made against British Establishment figures

» Peadar Whelan

At the centre of the affair was Kincora housemaster William McGrath, who was the head of the loyalist paramilitary group Tara and a man central to the formation of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in 1971.

REVELATIONS about the sexual abuse of
children by fallen TV icon and friend of British royalty and Margaret Thatcher,
Jimmy Savile, have rocked an otherwise solid British Establishment.

The stories of Jimmy Savile’s seemingly
insatiable sexual appetite has also shaken that pillar of society and beacon of
propriety, the BBC.

The reputation of the British state-run
broadcaster – under whose cover many of Savile’s predatory attacks occurred –
has taken a battering.

It has forced the resignation of BBC
Director General George Entwistle after being in the job for less than two
months. His position became untenable, when it emerged he knew nothing of the
BBC Newsnight programme’s intention to broadcast unsubstantiated allegations
linking a very senior Tory politician from the Thatcher era to a child abuse
sex ring at a children’s home in Wales.

The revelations around Jimmy Savile and the
suspicions that people in authority knew about and covered up his abuse have
clear echoes of the scandal surrounding the Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast in
the 1970s and 1980s.

The systematic abuse of young boys in the
home and the part played by the British intelligence organisations to keep the
scandal under wraps ensured that one side of the murky world of unionist
paramilitarism and its links to the crown forces was kept out of the public
domain for years.

The scandal eventually unravelled in the
early 1980s.

At the centre of the affair was Kincora
housemaster William McGrath, who was the head of the loyalist paramilitary
group Tara and a man central to the formation of the loyalist Ulster Defence
Association (UDA) in 1971.

McGrath was also closely connected to
senior figures in both major unionist parties as well as having links to the
Orange Order. Indeed, a previous Grand Master of the Orange Order and Ulster
Unionist MP Martin Smyth presided over the dedication of McGrath’s Irish
Heritage Orange Lodge.

McGrath and his associates in the Kincora
Boys’ Home, in east Belfast, sexually abused the boys under their care on a
regular basis. Some of the boys in the home were from troubled family
backgrounds while others were orphans who were particularly vulnerable as they
had no protection from their abusers.

Allegations were made in Private Eye when
the Kincora affair was first exposed that senior British military and judicial
figures engaged in sex with the boys. Some commentators have disputed theses
charges but what has never been in doubt is the fact that senior unionists with
whom McGrath was associated failed to take any action to expose and or prevent
the continued abuse in the home.

Intelligence operatives passed on
first-hand information to politico-military figures based in British Army
headquarters at Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn to the effect that the Tara
leaders and others were abusing boys in the home.

A British Army intelligence officer known
as ‘James’ was receiving information from a Tara insider called ‘Sydney’ and
was constantly updating his superiors.

The British Army officer was eventually
told by a political adviser to drop any contacts or investigation into Tara.

Another significant dimension to the
Kincora and McGrath/Tara story is the connection with the apartheid regime in
South Africa.

McGrath recruited teenager Charles Simpson
into Tara in the 1970s. Simpson was later encouraged to emigrate to southern
Africa where he enlisted in the army of the renegade, white-dominated former
British colony led by Ian Smith. He was later to move to South Africa and join
the South African police.

It was Simpson and Dick Wright – an uncle
of Alan Wright of the Ulster Clubs, who was an arms procurement officer with
Armscor, the South African arms industry – that British Army agent Brian Nelson
used to import tons of arms distributed to the UDA, UVF and other loyalist
death squads in the late 1980s.

McGrath was convicted in 1981 and sentenced
to four years’ imprisonment for the sexual abuse of boys in Kincora. Despite
his trial and five separate inquiries into the Kincora scandal, the real story
has yet to emerge.

William McGrath died in Ballyhalbert,
County Down, in 1992.

It remains to be seen if the Jimmy Savile
and similar scandals will reawaken investigations into Kincora and the role of
the British military and intelligence services.